Sexual Politics

How Labor Will Impose the Queer Revolution

Elisabeth Taylor

In December 2018, the ALP voted on the national platform they will take to the federal election. Among a suite of policies to advance the cause of LGBT rights, it included a statement of strong opposition to the deplorable practice of “conversion therapy”. On the face of it, there should be nothing alarming in this. “Conversion therapy”, rightly understood, refers specifically to medically unethical treatments inflicted or facilitated on a person against their will, in the mistaken belief that this may “correct” a homosexual orientation. Such treatments contribute, unsurprisingly, to social stigma associated with homosexuality and to depression for the individual concerned.[1] “Conversion therapy” is thus rightly condemned in international law. No compassionate, right-thinking person would support it.

There is no evidence that “conversion therapy”, in this sense, is being practised anywhere in Australia. The ALP platform has not been drafted in response to the sudden discovery that barbaric practices from “the dark ages” are being enacted on powerless victims in a church basement near you.[2] Rather, the undoubted suffering of an LGBT minority is being used to provoke a sense of urgency for policy change. Activists hope that, given sufficient media attention, a public newly awakened to the unimaginable (but previously unsuspected) horrors of conversion therapy, will then gratefully embrace the “solutions” proffered by enlightened “progressives” without too much critical examination.

In this way condemnation of the diabolical epidemic of “conversion therapy” works as a diversion to deflect attention while the rainbow movement implements policies that advance their agenda for radical social transformation. Masquerading as the “progressive reform” of the existing social order, the ALP platform serves the quite different aim of eradicating a social order based on “heteronormativity” to replace it with one based on queernormatvity. What is proposed is revolution—a fundamental rearrangement of society—rather than reform. In LGBT narratives this transformation is explicitly recognised and welcomed as “the queer revolution”.

The real agenda is a socialist revolution

The proposed revolution is no longer simply an economic one, proposing collective ownership of the means of production. (The voting public might see that coming.) Rather, cultural Marxism takes aim at every type of “privilege”. Anything prioritised by a prevailing value system can be represented as “privilege”. Simply being white, male, heterosexual, gender-congruent, educated, successful or able-bodied confers privilege. Privilege, we are told, is invisible to those who have it, so the accusation of privilege constitutes a versatile weapon that can potentially be levelled at any individual who breathes. Any value system that confers privilege may be decried so that all social goods can be co-opted for the benefit of the collective. The wolf may wear new clothing but it is essentially the same wolf.

Those who enjoy privilege are the new-money equivalent of Marxism’s despised bourgeoisie. Contemptible beneficiaries of a corrupt system and heedless of the suffering of those around them, the privileged revel in the enjoyment of undeserved luxuries. Whereas private property might be given away, those guilty of privilege can only escape condemnation and demonstrate virtue by expressing abhorrence for the value system that has conferred such benefits on them against their will. Fervent virtue-signalling and positive commitment to the demolition of all hierarchies is necessary if one is to avoid being exposed as an enemy of equality.

In LGBT parlance, “heteronormativity” represents the first value system marked for destruction. Queer humans, it is argued, are inherently “othered” by a social order in which gender congruence and heterosexuality are normative. Genuine “inclusion”, therefore, can be achieved only where new norms, based on queerness, are established. Activists have not named the group of norms proposed to replace heteronormativity but logic suggests that this should be referred to as “queernormativity”.

Rather than advocating for the rights of a fixed LGBT minority of the population, it is important to understand that proponents of this worldview believe that “sexual and gender diversity” represents the natural, liberated state of all people. Roz Ward, co-author of the Safe Schools program, has explained it this way:

LGBTI oppression and heteronormativity are woven into the fabric of capitalism … Only Marxism provides both the theory and the practice of genuine human liberation … [it] offers both the hope and the strategy needed to create a world where human sexuality, gender and how we relate to our bodies can blossom in extraordinarily new and amazing ways that we can only try to imagine today.[3]

People who are gender-congruent and heterosexually attracted are really just oppressed by heteronormativity so that they don’t understand what is good for them. They await the liberation to be ushered in by the queer revolution.

The queer revolution must destroy the family

The family has long been identified in gay rights narratives as the cornerstone of heteronormativity. It is identified by traditional Marxists and their LGBT political antecedents as a major obstacle to utopia.[4] Ward has explained that a capitalist ruling class has successfully persuaded the unenlightened masses that they should get married, have children and look after those children in families—thus cunningly reproducing the labour force.[5] The traditional nuclear family is the vehicle through which one generation communicates expectations of heterosexuality and gender congruence to an impressionable next generation, in a self-perpetuating cycle. An agenda to dismantle heteronormativity must therefore encompass the destruction of the family. [6]

As a first step, the school system has been co-opted to the service of Marxist LGBT activism to re-educate children regarding the evils of heteronormativity and to recruit the next generation of activists for the cause. The interruption of heteronormativity within the school system forms the principal motivation of the Safe Schools program and others like it, and these programs are already bearing fruit. Nevo Zisin, a former poster-child for the Safe Schools program and now early-career non-binary activist, has acknowledged the ultimate goal as “the queer revolution”, announcing triumphantly that it “is happening right now—it’s not even coming any more; it’s happening right now!”[7]

Perhaps young activists like Zisin have failed to notice that the queer revolution shares much of the same ideological DNA as the socialism that underpinned some of the most horrifically oppressive regimes in human history. Whether Zisin is a convinced ideologue or the ignorant puppet of a movement whose full ambitions they has [sic] insufficiently comprehended[8], the result is the same. Zisin and many of her generation are convinced adherents of a movement that proposes the destruction of the nuclear family, the obliteration of foundational democratic freedoms, and the eradication of pluralism in the name of social justice.

SOGI—Human Identity Re-Imagined

Underpinning the ideal of liberty espoused by queer revolutionaries is an understanding that human identity—often described as “who you really are”—should be conceived as a matrix of gender identity (subjective feelings of being male, female, both or neither) and sexual orientation. Each of these aspects of identity is represented as varying independently of one another and as unrelated to biological sex. The gay rights movement promoted the idea that sexuality is fixed from birth, analogous to race, and therefore as real as something written into the body. Agreement with the narratives of the transgender rights movement requires a further imaginative stretch. Where gender identity is out of sync with the information conveyed by the body, this is because the body is wrong and may need to be changed to convey the correct information about who someone really is. Subjective gender identity must therefore be regarded as more real than the body. The purpose of the body is only to give expression to someone’s sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI).

According to the queer revolutionaries, for a person to be truly free, sexual orientation and gender identity must be permitted to express themselves without constraint. Activists argue that surgical interventions to align the body with the disembodied gender identity should be freely available to anyone, even when gender identity is acknowledged to be fluid. (“Just because something is changing and growing doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”)[9] Similarly, advocacy for unfettered sexual freedom is implicit in the arguments of various groups (including, unsurprisingly, the sex industry) that favour “sexual liberation” for all (including advocacy for the “sexual rights” of children). It seems that the ALP policy agrees with the premise that any challenge to freedom of sexual expression should be condemned. According to the recent communications of Victoria’s Health Complaints Commissioner, “conversion therapy” includes any therapy or practice that aims to “suppress or eliminate a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity, including through celibacy or abstinence”.[10] Advising abstinence can only count as conversion therapy if it is first understood that free sexual expression cannot be distinguished from sexual orientation and is therefore a protectable attribute of SOGI.

A SOGI human identity is essentially disembodied. “Who you really are”—your gender identity and sexual orientation—cannot be deduced simply by observing the physical body or natal sex. Logically, if “who you really are”, has nothing to do with your body, then your parentage contributes nothing to it. If this is so, then the importance of biological family ties is reduced to nothing. This has the secondary effect of eliminating ethical objections to the free availability of assisted reproductive technology, mitochondrial donation and commercial surrogacy. It also makes it unethical for parents to attempt to bring their children up in conformity with their own convictions (a protected human right) where these convictions conflict with the freedom of the all-important SOGI identity to discover and express itself. The promotion of SOGI and the proposed criminalisation of alternative understandings of human identity outlined in Labor policy therefore have far-reaching potential to dismantle the family.

The ALP Platform Implements SOGI

The ALP platform works to advance the queer revolution by enshrining SOGI as the “correct” way to conceive of the human person seeking to restrict, marginalise or control dissenting views. The draft ALP Party Platform states:

Labor will support the Yogyakarta Principles on the Application of International Human Rights Law in Relation to Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, and will promote resolutions to support human rights protections for lesbians and gay men and bisexual and transgender and intersex people at the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly of the United Nations.

Beyond this, the document does not clarify what is entailed in these principles, so casual readers may be unaware that these principles form a blueprint for the creation of a genderless society. The principles were formulated at a 2007 conference in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, by a group of self-selected “human rights experts”. The illusion of authority was created by presenting these principles to the public from the UN building in Geneva, together with a handbook—The Activist’s Guide to the Yogyakarta Principles—to facilitate their worldwide implementation.

The ALP has supported the incorporation of the Yogyakarta principles in Australian law for many years. Expressions of positive commitment to SOGI may be found, for example, in the 2013 changes to the Commonwealth Sex Discrimination Act. Under the Gillard government, the terms “man” and “woman” were removed and replaced with SOGI as significant protectable attributes in law. The Safe Schools program and others like it, which utilise the school system to promulgate SOGI ideology to the next generation, have been promoted principally under ALP state governments.

The proposals in the 2018 platform therefore are only the latest articulation of Labor’s consistent record of advancing a socialist agenda. We all await the publication of the finalised ALP platform but the draft is replete with examples of support for queernormativity. These include:

# removing exemptions to discrimination law that currently allow religious schools to teach traditional sexual ethics.[18]

# limitations on freedom of religion where these might be used “as an instrument of division or exclusion … condemning anyone, discriminating against anyone, vilifying anyone is a violation of the values we all share, a violation which can never be justified by anyone’s faith or belief”.[19]

# removing government funding from sporting bodies that differentiate between men and women on the basis of biology, rather than gender identity. [20]

# establishing “a Commissioner for Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Intersex Status issues, to work across government and private sector to reduce discrimination”.[21]

# limiting freedom of speech wherever “Homophobic, biphobic, transphobic and intersexphobic harassment [and this is understood as any disagreement with the new state-imposed truth of SOGI] by the written or spoken word causes actual harm, not simple mere offence, to people who have suffered discrimination and prejudice, and causes particular harm to young same-sex-attracted, or gender-questioning and intersex people, and considers such harmful harassment is an unacceptable abuse of the responsibilities that come with freedom of speech and must be subject to effective sanctions.[22]

The machinery for punishing dissent and enforcing compliance with SOGI ideology is thus fully articulated in the ALP manifesto and waits only victory in the coming federal election to be written into law. Once realised in legislation, the proposals of the ALP national platform would contribute significantly to accomplishing the objectives of the queer revolution.

Conversion therapy

The manipulation of the definition of “conversion therapy” (described earlier), is one of many examples of linguistic trickery used to mask the socialist agenda but one that warrants particularly close attention for its potential to empower the state to dictate what Australian parents may and may not teach their children.

In the draft of the 2018 ALP platform, Item 83 states, “Labor opposes the practice of so-called conversion and reparative therapies on LGBTIQ+ people and seek to criminalise these practices.” This was downgraded to civil penalties in the final draft for what appear to be pragmatic reasons: it is much easier to pursue civil cases, with lower standards of evidence required by civil tribunals. The rainbow movement has learned through experience that the process of navigating burdensome civil proceedings is often sufficient punishment to discourage opposition to their agenda. If confirmation were needed that Labor’s opposition to “conversion therapy” is undiminished, it has been supplied by the more recent statements of Premier Daniel Andrews to Melbourne’s Pride March of his government’s commitment to ending the “harmful, prejudiced, and discredited” practice of “conversion therapy” which, he assured his listeners, “will be against the law”.[23] When it is understood that “conversion therapy” is used here to refer to anything short of affirmation of SOGI, the potential for this to be used to penalise traditionally-minded parents—who, for example, assume that their female-bodied offspring may be a girl—becomes apparent.

It might seem an impossible stretch to link the type of state-imposed torturous conversion therapy legitimately criticised by the UN on human rights grounds with behaviours which represent mere lack of “affirmation” or disagreement with SOGI. Yet this is precisely the stretch made repeatedly in activist narratives which conflate grievous crimes with trivial—and questionable—offences. For example, in an article for the Age on October 15, Farrah Tomazin describes the situation of a woman who was plunged in ice baths and had electrodes attached to her genitals in the 1980s in an attempt to cure lesbianism. Tomazin’s language merges this barbarous treatment with voluntary faith-based counselling:

While hers is an extreme example, the research estimates that up to 10 per cent of LGBT Australians are still vulnerable to so-called conversion therapy, much of it taking the form of faith-based counselling or pastoral activities steeped in the belief that homosexuality is a form of “brokenness” that ought to be fixed.[24]

That last sentence really captures the essence of the offence. Torture and counselling can be regarded as equally damaging because they equally demonstrate unbelief in the new truth about the human person promulgated by the Yogyakarta principles and framed by SOGI. If you believe that homosexuality is a form of “brokenness” and you offer to talk it over with someone, if you even advise them against acting on their sexual impulses, then you are guilty of the terrible crime of “conversion therapy”.

International suppression of opposing views

Internationally, objections to bans on “conversion therapy” arise from many professions for different reasons. Nicholas Cummings, former President of the APA, is a man of liberal political views who supports same-sex marriage, and yet has argued that counselling should be available for those experiencing unwanted same-sex attraction, simply as a matter of patient choice. He questions why, when someone can be counselled on any other matter, their sexual orientation should be marked out as an official “no go” zone. Lane Anderson, a psychotherapist who declares similarly liberal political views, has identified professional conflict with the emerging transgender narrative as the reason for her resignation from her profession:

I am suddenly … discouraged from exploring the underlying causes and conditions of my patients’ distress (as I was trained to do), and instead forced to put my professional stamp of approval upon a prefab, one-size-fits-all narrative intended to explain the complexity of my patient’s troubles … It’s as if I am being held hostage.[25]

In the same article Anderson professes confusion about why the trans movement is being led by the establishment. Why should an elite intervene so directly in clinical practice between therapist and client to mark certain topics as a priori off limits? She is particularly concerned about the effect this has on children:

We used to treat kids with mental health problems, but now it’s all about validating their emerging and shifting identities. As professionals, if we don’t loudly prioritise their identities as being the most important thing about them (and identities do shift constantly in kids and teens), we risk coming across as unsupportive and even immoral. Identity development has always been a teen task, but in the past it wasn’t necessarily supposed to become a lifestyle, to colonise the entirety of your existence.[26]

Paediatricians too have criticised as medically unethical the practice of treating childhood gender dysphoria with hormones and surgery while neglecting other potential remedies to a child’s distress. The criminalisation of “conversion therapy” (if interpreted as the activists intend, as referring to any reference to the idea that homosexuality or transgender identity may proceed something more fundamental—and thus, represent a type of “brokenness”) would make it impossible to legally counsel a child towards congruence with their biological sex.

In Canada, where Dr Kenneth Zucker’s practice had a remarkable record of success in reconciling gender-dysphoric children to their natal sex, activists brought false allegations concerning his professional conduct and succeeded in closing his clinic. Paul McHugh and Lawrence Mayer’s rigorous analysis of academic research on gender and sexuality published findings at variance with activist narratives, with resultant protests and the threat to Johns Hopkins University that its Healthcare Equality Index rating would be lowered if it did not redact or retract the report.[27] Bath Spa University refused a PhD research proposal to examine the growing phenomenon of “de-transitioning” because it was politically incorrect.[28] Research from Brown University which pointed to social contaminants in a transgender identity was protested and withdrawn.[29] Even in Australia, speakers who expose the unscientific origins and ongoing assumptions of transgender medicine are protested and de-platformed.[30] Doctors who brave the fury of the LGBT lobby are met with vociferous professional attack. Only last year, proposals were advanced to change the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (APRHA) guidelines so that doctors are limited personally and professionally in what they can say and requiring them to clarify where their opinions might differ from undefinable “generally accepted views”.[31] If the truth about sexuality and gender is so very clear, why do activists want such a big stick to silence opposing views?

The imposition of political constraints on open, objective, academic research that might provide counter-factual evidence to the activist narrative demonstrates that the objective in all these efforts is not the welfare of individuals—LGBT or otherwise. As Paul McHugh commented: “Hell hath no fury like a vested interest masquerading as a moral principle.”[32] Challenges to the “new orthodoxy” of SOGI are vehemently repelled because SOGI is essential to the destruction of the family and the advance of the queer revolution. The narrative that presents heteronormative views as inherently damaging to LGBT people, responsible for suicide and depression, works to screen the real objectives of a political agenda which has at its heart social disruption to prepare the ground for the queer revolution. It also serves to achieve the rhetorical victory of demonising advocates for the family (and the traditional morality that sustains it) as intolerant bigots.

Conclusion

ALP communications which continually emphasise that the interests of “Australian families” are the centre of the agenda are profoundly misleading. The deception of rainbow activists i cloaked in the language of “anti-discrimination” and “inclusion”. It is possible that many ALP members are unaware that the plans for the socialist revolution are fully articulated in their national platform. These policies, if implemented, would grant extraordinary powers to the state to intervene in the family lives of Australians—a hallmark of totalitarianism. Rather than supporting “Aussie families”, these policies are intended to hasten the end of the Australian family as we have always known it. They envisage the exchange of fundamental democratic freedoms and human rights (freedom of speech, religion, thought, conscience and belief, the rights of parents to bring up their children in accordance with their own convictions, among others) for the dubious advantage of “liberation” from oppressive gender norms and expectations of heterosexuality proffered in their place by the queer revolution.

Elisabeth Taylor is the Director of Research for the Australian Christian Lobby. She researches issues relating to gender and sexuality affecting Australian government policy, and lectures on subjects such as the origins and consequences of the sexual revolution, pornography, comprehensive sexuality education, LGBT rights activism and the Safe Schools program.

[1] See, for example, the UN Committee on Economic Social and Cultural Rights in General Comment No. 22: “…Likewise, regulations treating LGBTI persons as mental or psychiatric patients or requiring that they be “cured” by so-called “treatment” are a clear violation of their rights to sexual and reproductive health.” (4 March 2016, E/C.12/GC/22. Para 23.)

[2] And no self-respecting medievalist calls it the dark ages anymore.

[3] Roz Ward, “The role of the left in the struggle for LGBTI rights”, addressing The Marxism 2015 Conference Retrieved from http://marxismconference.org/index.php/previous-highlights/audio-archives/item/1310-The-role-of-the-left-in-the-struggle-for-LGBTI-rights.html

[4] Professor Gary Dowsett, for example, affirms that the destruction of the family has been a major ambition of the gay rights movement for decades. As “the cornerstone of gender and sexuality” the family is “part of the capitalist system of production and consumption.” (“Rethinking HIV in the Future of Gay Men”, Beyond Behaviours: Uncovering the Social Production of HIV Epidemics Among Gay Men, April 2013, Vancouver, Canada. (Available at: https://youtu.be/ydfaAcTomZ0).

[5] Roz Ward explained it this way: “To smooth the operation of capitalism, the ruling class has benefitted and continues to benefit from repressing our bodies, relationships, sexuality and gender identities. Alongside sexism, homophobia and transphobia, both serve to break the spirits of ordinary people to consume our thoughts to make us accept the status quo and for us to keep living or aspiring to live, or feel like we should live, in small social units and families where we must reproduce and take responsibility for those people in those units.”

[6] This is a new rendition of an old theme. Frederick Engels argued that the destruction of the nuclear family was essential if the socialist revolution was to be a permanent one. Groups of individuals exercise a form of collective power and the nuclear family is the fundamental group unit of society. Therefore, only by eradicating of the nuclear family can the state ensure that there are no intermediary groups between each individual citizen and the collective power vested entirely in the state. The suggested means for this destruction has also been envisaged for decades by the homosexual rights movement.

[9] Nevo Zisin, “Beyond the Binary”. This idea is further explored by Andrea Long Chu, “My New Vagina Won’t Make Me Happy: And it shouldn’t have to”, New York Times, 24 November 2018. (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/24/opinion/sunday/vaginoplasty-transgender-medicine.html), where the author objects that “the medical professional [is installed] as a little king of someone else’s body”; that doctors are ‘gatekeepers’ to surgery and hormone treatments on the supposition that doctors are best-placed to decide what will and what will harm their dysphoric patient. The author believes that “as long as transgender medicine retains the alleviation of pain as its benchmark of success, it will reserve for itself, with a dictator’s benevolence, the right to withhold care from those who want it.” Treatment, we are to understand, should be available on demand; patients should not have to satisfy any objective judgments of whether surgery and hormones are in the patient’s best interests.

4 comments

Biggles –26th April 2019

The great problem is that modern young people do not read history, (or anything else, for that matter). Were they to read say, The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels and absorb the meaning of Marx’s 10 points, or Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago or view Edvins Snore’s DVD, The Soviet Story, or see anything by Prof. Yuri Maltsev, they would recoil in horror. But, though all such information is available in plain sight, the efforts of the Left are aimed at withholding it from them.
Ask ANY youngster between the ages of 17 & 25 what they are reading at the moment and brace yourself for a shock.

Stephen Due –26th April 2019

But is Marxism really the problem? Admittedly the opponents of the biological family express themselves using Marxist rhetoric. One might imagine that the best approach is to argue against Marxism, stressing its negative consequences and muddled reasoning. But what if the real problem lies deeper, like the faulty foundations under a wall that keeps cracking, though the cracks are repeatedly repaired?
From a Christian perspective there is clear evidence that the foundations of the ‘progressive’ society are faulty. It is the substructure, the fundamental worldview, that is weak and needs to be repaired. History shows and experience confirms, that the only sure foundation is the Christianity we once knew.
Of course, the owners of the building still think the remedy lies in repairing the cracking walls. They are working away with the trowel of Reason and the cement of Common Humanity. But as fast as they fill one crack, another appears. Perhaps the light will gradually begin to dawn. One can only hope so.

T B LYNCH –27th April 2019

Gender is a construct of language. Many inanimate objects are assigned a gender in latin and french. Even in english we regard ships and aircraft as female.
Sex is a matter of biology. At least 99% of the time it can be decided by simple inspection – no doctor required. Even bacteria engage in sex to rejuvenate [make young again] their clones. The bacteria get it right – there is one male gene donor and one female gene recipient. So it is really quite simple.
If the crazies want to have 60 different genders good luck to them. There are still only two sexes and anyone who thinks otherwise is ill, and really does need treatment.

Stephen Holgate –30th August 2019

Thankyou for this well written and researched article. It certainly explains and confirms my experience of activism that I have observed in one school.